THERE are about 1,800 staff employed by Hereford Hospitals NHS Trust, all dedicated in one way or another to care for patients.

Looking after those who are looking after you is the occupational health team, which is headed up by Julie Davis with Janet Lawrence and Jenny Karayiannis as advisers and Mindy Barratt as a clinic nurse.

For Julie, her day is never the same. She starts at 8.45am when the team gets together to discuss the day’s workload.

She said: “Between 9am and noon, team members will be involved in pre-employment screening clinics, which include assessing fitness to work, immunisations and vision screening for VDU users. They support and advise staff returning to work following sickness and provide a service to small and medium enterprises, where they carry out hearing checks, lung function tests and vaccinations.

“Meanwhile, I’ll be attending meetings and answering day-to-day queries from staff and managers. I am also involved in projects focused on the health and wellbeing of staff and I may well see staff requiring support.

“As a team, we also look at pre-employment staff questionnaires to assess what is required to carry out the post.

“Between 1.30 and 4.30pm, together with two advisers, I’ll take referral clinics while the third adviser holds telephone consultations.

“Many other things could happen during the day. There could be an outbreak of the so-called winter vomiting bug, Norovirus, and we would need to give staff advice.

“We may have needle stick injuries to deal with or we could be putting on health and wellbeing days.

“Running alongside all this, the occupational health physician may be undertaking a clinic and we could have one of our therapists in providing complementary therapies.

“We are committed to providing a healthy and happy life for our staff and believe this is paramount to a productive workforce.

“This is never so apparent than at the present time, when there is a lot of pressure for hospitals to perform.”